Americans Lose Nearly a Full Day per Year Waiting for Web Pages to Load
Research shows MSN on Windows 8 is more than 4 times faster, on average, than leading news and information sites
Today’s web is defined by speed.
The web today is more than just static pages, it’s loaded with rich video, photos, graphics, and audio that elicits the need for speed. The pressure is on for web sites to keep their pages loading fast to avoid the common problem of click and ditch, people abandoning a web site when it is unable to load quickly. Each second and even fractions of a second matter, and when added up over an entire year they equate to nearly a full day lost per year, according to calculations based on comScore and Keynote data*.
Next to security and ease of use, our customers have told us that speed is one of the most important factors when choosing what websites to go to. In fact, it’s one of the top five improvements that customers consistently request of media sites. Our research shows, a sluggish load time leads to consumer dissatisfaction and on average people abandon content sites if they do not load quickly enough. The average page load time in the news and information category is more than 3.5 seconds.
We suspected that people would be even more sensitive to page latency on touch-enabled tablets running Windows 8, and we saw a unique opportunity to build a faster, more modern site using the features available in Internet Explorer 10 and Windows 8. To test the engineering methodology after the new site launched, Microsoft commissioned a study to benchmark the performance of MSN for Windows 8 against the previous version of MSN, and also against other sites in the news and information category.
Today, Principal Technologies, Inc., released the results of this study that showed MSN for Windows 8 is more than 4x faster on average than 8 top major online competitors as measured by page load time across the landing site, topic hubs and articles. According to the study, MSN for Windows 8 is three times faster than earlier versions of MSN.
Because Internet Explorer 10 was designed to take advantage of the system architecture of Windows 8, rendering complex page layouts and high resolution images is faster and more fluidly. That’s why load times for MSN for Windows 8 are more than four times faster on average than other leading news and information sites.
Other notable findings include:
- Sports on MSN for Windows 8 is more than 7 times faster on average than other major online sports sites, e.g., ESPN and NFL.
- News on MSN for Windows 8 is more than 3 times faster on average than other major news sites, e.g., CNN and New York Times.
- Finance on MSN for Windows 8 is more than 4 times faster on average than the WSJ and Forbes sites.
We invite people to view the results for themselves here. You can experience the new MSN on Windows 8 on any Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 device.
- Bob Visse, General Manager, MSN
* We referenced comScore and Keynote to calculate that figure. comScore provides the total number of pages viewed on average by a user, which was 38,665 in the United States in 2012. Keynote is the leading monitor of website performance and publishes indices that indicate the average load times for the majority of major sites on the web. We took the average of 5 major indices: news, social networking, top retailers, government top 40 and business top 40, to come up with an average load time for internet pages which was 2.04 seconds. When annualized, this comes to approximately 22 hours per year.
